Accessing a public API is like plugging an appliance into an electrical outlet. The outlet allows a variety of devices to access the same power source and use it for any number of purposes — public APIs do something similar with software and data. It’s a simple relationship that involves one company providing another company with easy access to its data in much the same way that a power company allows you to use its electricity to power the many electronic devices in your home.

Much like the near ubiquity of electrical outlets, public APIs have become quite popular over the last few years. Seemingly every company is either using a public API to request data or operating one to provide it. They’re becoming more and more important to the way software is developed, and that seems unlikely to change any time soon.

That’s what Apigee is counting on, anyway. The company allows enterprise customers and indie developers alike to easily create, manage, and access the many APIs that enable their products. It previously did that by providing customers with a simple drag-and-drop interface through which they could easily edit XML files, among other things. Today the company is announcing that it has developed a yet-to-be-named tool meant to appeal to developers who would rather write a few hundred lines of code that works with the Node.js platform than use their custom interface.

The tool, which the company intends to open-source, allows a number of Node.js instances to operate on a virtual machine. Node.js is a system built on the JavaScript runtime to “provide an easy way to create scalable network programs.” Basically, it makes it easier for developers to manage APIs through code instead of through tools that companies like Apigee have been providing for years. In many ways, the announcement represents the dual nature of APIs and the ways they are developed.

Apigee’s chief architect, Gregory Brail, says that APIs aren’t nearly as simple as they’re often portrayed. They aren’t simply tools that allow companies to integrate someone else’s data into their apps — they’re an entire set of technologies that can be used to expedite product development inside a company as well as outside of it. “It’s almost like public APIs have infected people’s consciousness,” he says. “But, more and more, people are starting to realize that APIs aren’t just platforms for third parties to access data.”

As more companies start to use APIs to suit a variety of purposes companies like Apigee will have to support a variety of different development styles. That’s what the new tool is all about, allowing Apigee’s existing customers to continue using the interface they’ve been using for years while also helping the service appeal to new customers who would prefer to work with something like Node.js.

Put another way, some people use electrical outlets to access electricity provided by a power company; others use them to use the electricity created by their own generator. Apigee needs to supply electrical outlets capable of supporting both systems and being installed by laymen and professionals alike.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]